Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for ChildrenKingsley, Charles
History
Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children
Kingsley, Charles
Geology -- Juvenile literature; Natural history -- Juvenile literature
Or again, if you ever go up Deeside in Scotland, towards Balmoral, and
turn up Glen Muick, towards Alt-na-guisach, of which you may see a
picture in the Queen's last book, you will observe standing on your right
hand, just above Birk Hall, three pretty rounded knolls, which they call
the Coile Hills. You may easily know them by their being covered with
beautiful green grass instead of heather. That is because they are made
of serpentine or volcanic rock, which (as you have seen) often cuts into
beautiful red and green marble; and which also carries a very rich soil
because it is full of magnesia. If you go up those hills, you get a
glorious view--the mountains sweeping round you where you stand, up to
the top of Lochnagar, with its bleak walls a thousand feet perpendicular,
and gullies into which the sun never shines, and round to the dark fir
forests of the Ballochbuie. That is the arc of the bow; and the cord of
the bow is the silver Dee, more than a thousand feet below you; and in
the centre of the cord, where the arrow would be fitted in, stands
Balmoral, with its Castle, and its Gardens, and its Park, and pleasant
cottages and homesteads all around. And when you have looked at the
beautiful amphitheatre of forest at your feet, and looked too at the
great mountains to the westward, and Benaun, and Benna-buird and Benna-
muicdhui, with their bright patches of eternal snow, I should advise you
to look at the rock on which you stand, and see what you see there. And
you will see that on the side of the Coiles towards Lochnagar, and
between the knolls of them, are scattered streams, as it were, of great
round boulder stones--which are not serpentine, but granite from the top
of Lochnagar, five miles away. And you will see that the knolls of
serpentine rock, or at least their backs and shoulders towards Lochnagar,
are all smoothed and polished till they are as round as the backs of
sheep, "roches moutonnees," as the French call ice-polished rocks; and
then, if you understand what that means, you will say, as I said, "I am
perfectly certain that this great basin between me and Lochnagar, which
is now 3000 feet deep of empty air was once filled up with ice to the
height of the hills on which I stand--about 1700 feet high--and that that
ice ran over into Glen Muick, between these pretty knolls, and covered
the ground where Birk Hall now stands."
And more:--When you see growing on those knolls of serpentine a few
pretty little Alpine plants, which have no business down there so low,
you will have a fair right to say, as I said, "The seeds of these plants
were brought by the ice ages and ages since from off the mountain range
of Lochnagar, and left here, nestling among the rocks, to found a fresh
colony, far from their old mountain home."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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